Middleman - Pdf Tilt template engine

Middleman-Pdf-template-engine.md

Middleman - PDF template engine

This article explain how to configure PDF-Tilt in a middleman project.

After hours of investigations it turned out to be easier than expected, initially I have tried to make an extension and register a custom made engine into tilt, after numerous fails google came in handy once again with pdf-tilt implementation.

Note: pdf-tilt relies on PDFKit which in its turn relies on wkhtmltopdf. wkhtmltopdf needs an X server (screen), and in my case using Ubuntu Saucy some dependencies for the patched (full feature) version ware hard to be satisfied, I found no solution so far.

For a working solution here is what you can do:

Add the gems into projects Gemfile :

${projectPath}/Gemfile

...

gem 'pry'

gem 'tilt-pdf' 

...

Pull ruby libraries

shell in ${projectPath}

$ bundle install

Install wkhtmltopdf on your system:

shell

$ sudo apt-get install wkpdftohtml 

For a more detailed installation instructions or other OS please refer to : http://wkhtmltopdf.org/downloads.html

Disable the layout for pdf files in the project config.rb file

${projectPath}/config.rb

...

page "*.pdf", :layout => false 

...

The preparation is ready, now you can create your source file for the pdf, add in your project sources a file named test.pdf.rpdf.

This file is actually a yml format file which links together what is going to be send as parameters to wkpdftohtml, the file format is described here : https://github.com/lloeki/tilt-pdf

In my example I striped all the unsupported parameters:

${projectPath}/source/test.pdf.rpdf

page-size: A4
main: index.haml
stylesheets:
  - stylesheets/pdf.css

Run your server and check.

Browser

http://localhost:4567/test.pdf

A last note : if a parameter is unrecognized wkpdftohtml will throw an error, look into server console for it.